Abstract：There are two basic psychologic types for language learning: one is of intuition which can be acquired by feelings and the other is of logic and reason. Children learn language by intuition and they have inborn language acquisition mechanism. This paper presents an analysis of linguistic features that exist in a foreign language learning setting, which is critical in the discussion of children’s characteristics in second language acquisition. This paper shows the process of language learning cases of kindergarden students and primary school students.
Key words: Linguistic Features; Learning Stage; Imitation
CLC number: H319.3 Article character: A
Introduction
Tarone (1980)[2] has developed learning strategies in the learning of target language vocabulary, memorization, and repetition of troublesome target langauge structures. In examing the development of second language learning strategies among young children in bilingual classrooms, we have expanded Tarone’s defintion to include attempts by learners to develop linguistic competence in the target language.
Traditionally, teacher teaches children specific words and sentences and then gives them linguistic ideas about the theory of the language knowledge. This article will discuss the cases of students’ learning characteristics from the point of morphemic and syntactic features.
Material
Two groups of studets as subjects are involved in this experiment. One is students from kindergarden aged from 3 to 5 years old and the other is students from primary school aged from 6 to 10 years old. Data is collected by the learning results of the two groups. Students from kindergarden have learned English for about 1 year, and the primary school students have learned English for a longer time. One year’s study in English and 3 years’ study in English made no much difference.
Method
Hypothesis
This experiment is expected to take 4 weeks as a circle period. Two groups of students are supposed to learn English within 2 stages. The goal is to show how two groups learn a second language. To this end, 2 hypotheses are formulated:
Hypothesis 1: Primary school students mistake easily and spend more time learning.
Hypothesis 2: Kindergarden students make less syntactic mistakes.
Analysis of Data
Morphemic Stage
This stage lasts 2 weeks. During this week, both groups learn common-used words and make simple sentences in the need of practice. Data is collected by the tester to analyze the learning characteristics of both groups and try to prove hypothesis 1.
Being asked to read or make sentences, younger students can speak without hesitation, while elder students think much time before giving their answers.
Primary school students mix up part of speech of words such as taking his for he, and have problems of affix like ing. ie. cleaning the floor clean in the floor
Primary school students feel confused about words similar in shape and pronunciation. ie. p & q ; s& x.
I’m from America I’m from A’erian
Close your books clo your books
Kindergarden students seldom made those mistakes because they imitate instead of reasoning while primary school students try to make something logic out of learning a language.
For primary school students, there are some hackneyed
mistakes made by many students.
1. The suffix of a noun plural
“Does she like sports?” “Does she like sport?”
They would not remember adding s after original words because they have formed stable recalling pattern.
2. The suffix of the third single person of a verb
“She likes basketball very much” “She like basketball very much”
“She works in a hospital” “She work in a hospital”.
When reading, students seldom mixed the word do with does because they are different words. Inflexion word like works was easily mistaken. They memorize does as a meaningful and independent word but not an individual word like works.
3. Possessive Case
One of the simplest possessive case ended in the letter ’s.
“Linda’s birthday” is read as “Linda birthday”.
From the above analysis, hypothesis 1 is proved.
Syntactic stage
This stage lasts 2 weeks. Syntactic mistakes are made by primary school students. They are unconsciously making mistakes.
1.Certain words were missing
This is your computer room, isn’t is? This is you computer room, is it?
In the above example, they omitted some sounds. Abbreviation makes sounds rather unclear.
2.Adjacent sounds influence the pronunciation of a certain word
“go out at night” “go night at night”.
The word out is not clear in hearing, and when it is uttered in a sentence, it became rather more ambiguous. It would easily be influenced and replaced by adjacent words.
3. Incorrect syntactic sentences
“She works in a hospital.” “Works she in hospital.”
Primary school students ingeniously created a lot of sentences disobeying the rules of English syntax. One was the inappropriateness of the auxiliary. Auxiliary words like do, have and be are rock-ribbedfor them.
Mistakes shown above were made by primary school students. Hypothsis 2 is accepted.
Results
The first stage shows kindergarden students learn language better because they learn to imitate. Primary school students try to reason so that they spent more time to learn and learn less well. The second stage shows the primary school students have some syntactic problems which the kindergarden students don’t have.
N. C. Ellis[1] (2006) reviewed how fluent language users are rational in their language processing, their unconscious language representation systems optimally prepared for comprehension and production, how language learners are intuitive statisticians. Therefore, the kindergarden students who use their intuitive ability to learn language learn better than the primary school students who try to comprehend.
Conclusion
There exists a best age for people to learn a language. Younger students learn language more flexibly and spontaneously[3]. This paper proved younger students have greater chances to learn a foreign language better because of their inborn language acquisition mechanism.The acquisition studies that I have concentrated upon for illustration here are far from enough in the field of SLA. Much remains to be done in further research on the learning characteristics of children in the educational field.
Reference
[1]Nick C. Ellis.Selective Attention and Transfer Phenomena in L2 Acquisition: Applied Linguistics.[A] Oxford University Press 2006.
[2]Tarone, E., A. Cohen, and G. Dumas. 1976. ‘A closer look at some interlanguage terminology: a framework for communication strategies.’ [M] Working Papers on Bilingualism 9.
[3]刘海瑛. 论幼儿二语习得的重要性. Journal of Hebei Institude of Technology. [J] Vol.3.No.4.,
Nov.2003.
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